I normally prefer to quote regular customers talking about their VMware successes — who needs to hear us quote ourselves about how great we are? But this one is pretty good, with EMC as the customer. (Of course EMC is Not VMware, but they do have a vested interest in us, so use whatever filters you deem fit; there are plenty of other successful VMware customer stories here.) EMC's Chad Sakac points to this latest case study on EMC and their experience virtualizing their Documentum eRoom implementation on VMware.
Virtual Geek: VMware and Documentum eRoom – or how EMC saved $1.5M.
1) the usual CapEx reasons (more important these days than ever!)
"Eliminated additional $1.5 milliion from planned budget expenditures and reigned in ongoing hardware and associated costs"
2) the normal "hey look at all this unexpected operational flexibility upside" reasons
"…several
fail-overs have already been handled by VMware – the entire process
only took a few minutes and the eRoom users never noticed a
disruption. In the past, such a failover would have significantly
impacted users and produced longer down times."3)
the always fun "wow – performance is good. WOW – really good!".
Everyone always is worried about this, almost always incorrectly.
Higher utilization can also be expressed as higher efficiency, which
for some workloads has an effect of getting MORE on the same hardware
(i.e. in this case we could have more front-ends)."the
final performance results acheived were significantly greater than
expected. Users were both pleased and astounded with the increased
performancel eRoom activities such as site access, opening stored
content, and saving files, are now instantaneous. Response delays
have been eliminated, yet the virtual site configuration is nearly
identical to the original physical hardware configuration."
And the money quote I'll retype for you here, since somebody at EMC decided to password-protect the case study PDF. (Hint, folks, you want people to cut-and-paste from your success stories.)
"We saved the company $1.5 million right off the top, plus cut ongoing costs for floor space, power, depreciation, and labor — and we get all these extra capabilities like easy expansion, smooth and plentiful fail-over, and faster performance. Basically, there was no downside." –Axel Kehlenbeck, project manager
A million and a half here, better SLAs there, and pretty soon you're talking about something worth doing. We won't be talking about eRoom, but we will be talking about virtualizing your enterprise messaging apps this Wednesday at noon PST on our VMware Communities Roundtable podcast.
